The Transistor Logic Gate

Rebuild the relay blueprint's gates with transistors and compare them directly.

1. NOT: one NPN transistor, base through a resistor to the input, collector through a resistor to supply. Output at the collector.
2. NOR: two transistors sharing one collector resistor — either input high pulls the output low.
3. NAND: two transistors in SERIES — both inputs must be high to pull the output low.
4. Verify each truth table, then measure propagation delay with the oscilloscope.

Series is AND and parallel is OR, exactly as with relay contacts — the topology did not change, only what is doing the switching. The delay will be tens of nanoseconds against the relay's milliseconds.

The valve machine's limit was heat. Measure whether that limit really went away.

1. Measure the current your transistor gate draws with the output high, and again with it low.
2. Now drive it with a square wave and measure average current against frequency.
3. Plot it and extrapolate.

Static current is small; average current rises roughly in proportion to switching frequency, because every transition charges and discharges the capacitance of the next stage, and that energy is dissipated as heat every single time.

So the heat problem never disappeared — it was postponed, and it returns the moment you have enough gates switching fast enough. That is precisely the wall processors hit around 2005, when clock speeds stopped rising and manufacturers began adding cores instead: not because faster was impossible, but because the heat was.

Everything needed has now been built. Put it together and notice that nothing is missing.

1. Gates — from this blueprint, or from relays if you prefer to hear it working.
2. An adder — from the binary adder blueprint.
3. Registers — flip-flops from the Eccles-Jordan blueprint.
4. Memory — core, or simply more flip-flops at small scale.
5. A program counter, an instruction decoder and a conditional jump — from the stored-program blueprint.
6. An assembler — from the previous blueprint, to make it usable by a human.

That is a complete general-purpose computer, and every part of it was invented before 1950. Everything since has been the same architecture made smaller, faster and cheaper — which is not a small thing, since it changed the world, but it is not a different thing.